Posts Tagged ‘future’

I can think of at least two solid reasons that makes envisioning the future a valuable practice for .. anyone interested in the future 🙂 The first is an over-used cliche – making sense of the “accelerating pace of change”. I don’t have much to elaborate here, but can point to at least one man who has explained (hypothesized?) with great eloquence what such accelerating change can mean in the span of our very lifetimes. I give you Mr. Ray Kurweil and his badass book The Singularity is Near.

For me, envisioning the future is so very cool because of this – envision the future, and then look back to the present through the lens of that future. It fundamentally changes how you see the world around you today. Imagine that whole bunch of disinterested people who went about their lives paying no heed to what was happening around them when powerful, history-shaping concepts came along – like christianity and buddhism, or electricity and the telephone – ideas that didn’t seem like much at the time, but move some centuries forward, and oh boy! its the stuff we live by … Kinda gets you thinking about what wifi and wikis will mean in a hundred years, right?